Management of XML documents without schema in relational database systems

摘要

Many applications deal with highly flexible XML documents from different sources, which makes it difficult to define their structure by a fixed schema or a DTD. Therefore, it is necessary to explore ways to cope with such XML documents. The paper analyzes different storage and retrieval methods for schemaless XML documents using the capabilities of relational systems. We compare our experiences with the implementation of an XML-to-relational mapping with an LOB implementation in a commercial RDBMS. The paper concludes with a vision of how different storage methods could converge towards a common high-level XML-API for databases.